Shark Island Page 19

  Tye grumbled and slid himself over to let Wolchko onto the platform. His thoughts cleared for a few seconds and he registered what Kat had told him about them all taking turns on top of the platform.

  “I should…,” he began. But really, what should he do? What could he do? Take his turn down below, bleed into the water, risk going up and down and taking turns until help arrived? Maybe that would be the noble thing, but it would also be the stupid thing.

  Shivering, head throbbing, the wind howling, he looked over the side again. Captain N’dour was down there, on the second crossbeam. It should’ve put him twenty feet above the water, but instead he was barely ten and when a swell rolled around the watchtower the captain clung only half a dozen feet above the wave. The tower swayed with the passing of the swell and the urgency of the wind and Tye heard the metal groan. It wasn’t a reassuring sound.

  “Kat?” he said, turning in search of her, only to remember that she’d already gone over the side.

  Wolchko knelt on the other side of the platform, giving Naomi a hand up.

  The wind roared and the tower tilted so hard that Tye gripped the edge of the platform. He felt stupid—they weren’t going over. The thing had been built to give a little bit. But with the water pushing at it, the way it leaned and the groaning of the metal made his heart race. The pounding in his skull increased and he tried to breathe more evenly, calm himself down. For the first time, he realized just how thirsty he was. The idea of becoming dehydrated out here surrounded by the ocean, with rain pouring down from the sky, felt like the sickest joke ever. Water, water everywhere … Wasn’t that how that old poem or whatever it was had gone? And not a drop to drink.

  Not funny. Not funny at all.

  “Tye? You all right?”

  He glanced up to see Wolchko and Naomi kneeling on the platform, watching him as if they thought he might grow a second head. Or a fin. Watching him the way he’d spent his life watching cultures and beakers and computers screens in his lab. If anyone else had asked, studying him like that, he might have told them to go to hell. But Naomi’s gaze shifted to the bloodstained cloth wrapped around his calf, and he remembered that she hadn’t been so lucky.

  Lucky? You think you’re lucky? a cruel, sneering voice—his own voice—asked in the back of his mind. But he didn’t like that version of himself, and he had an answer. Luckier than Naomi.

  “I’ll be all right. Just get some rest. It won’t be long till you have to swap places again.” Tye gestured at the rusted wind-and-rain-swept platform. “Four-star luxury up here. Enjoy it.”

  Wolchko and Naomi both frowned, apparently trying to figure out if he was being a cynic, a dick, or a cynical dick. Simmering with misery, he turned away from them and looked down into the water again. The next swell rolled beneath and around the tower, even higher than before, but this time as it passed, Tye saw a fin break the surface.

  He shot a glance down at N’Dour, directly below him. “Hey, Captain?”

  “I—” N’Dour began to reply.

  What would he have said? I see it? I want a cigarette? I wish I’d never met you fucking people?

  The shark struck the base of the tower so hard that huge flakes of rust fell like dirty snow. The impact reverberated through the bars, all the way up to the platform. Tye heard a voice cry out, figured it was Rosalie because Kat wouldn’t, would she? No. Kat wouldn’t show her fear like that.

  The shark hesitated a second, perhaps a bit dazed, and then slid along over the now-invisible rocks of Bald Cap and vanished into the dark.

  “—shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Naomi had begun to chant, behind Tye on the platform.

  Wolchko tried to comfort her. “It’s okay, kid. We’re up here and they’re—”

  But the acoustics man, Chill Eddie Wolchko—which Tye had sometimes called the guy when he and Kat were alone in the lab—sounded entirely unconvincing. Whether that was Asperger’s syndrome or pure uncertainty Tye didn’t know. Maybe Wolchko was remembering the thudding against the hull of the Thaumas and how that had ended. The signal they’d been broadcasting would still be going, even now, emanating from the sunken wreck of their boat. This wouldn’t be the last time one of these hyperaggressive fuckers bashed itself against the tower.

  Tye brushed rain from his eyes. The pain in his skull had ebbed a bit, which was a merciful relief, but in its absence the wounds on his leg had begun to remind him quite fervently that he’d been bitten by a shark. He shifted again on the platform, sucking air in through his bared teeth, and started to scan the water. Had the seals begun to settle? How many had gone up onto Deeley Island, unsure what to do now that the signal that had lured them had stopped moving? How many had been eaten? Would they adjust to the signal over time? Would the sharks?

  “Hey, Eddie,” he began, realizing Wolchko was the one to ask.

  Below, he heard Kat shout to Captain N’Dour. Tye looked down just in time to see a Great White thrust itself up out of a massive swell, jaws gaping wide as it aimed straight for N’Dour. The captain gave a shout and grabbed the lattice over his head, pulled his legs up to hang like some kind of marsupial. The shark missed him by just a couple of feet, then crashed bodily against the tower with a crunch of rending metal and a slamming impact that gave the whole structure a violent shake.

  Rosalie screamed as she fell; Tye saw her arms flailing as she tumbled toward the water. Kat made not a sound as she lost her balance. Tye could only watch as she grabbed at a bar, scraped her palm and fingers on jagged rust, and then—as she saw that she wasn’t going to hold on—thrust herself away from the tower.

  Tye heard a roar and thought it must be the wind or the ocean, but it was his own voice. Why had Kat done that, pushed away like that? He thought he knew, figured she feared she might strike the tower on the way down and break some bones, maybe her spine, maybe her skull. When she hit the water, she plunged into the rushing, roiling current a dozen feet from the base.

  “Tye, no!” Wolchko barked.

  He wasn’t even sure what Chill Eddie had objected to at first. Then he had already slipped over the side of the platform and he realized it was this. Hand over hand, feet dropping down, leg wounds splitting open again, ignoring it all, he descended the tower as fast as he could. Voices rode the wind, cries of fear from the water below and warnings from above, but they were nothing more than noise to him, just like the pain in his leg had become a distant thing, the heat of his freshly flowing blood no more a factor than the patter of the rain.

  “Get her!” he heard N’Dour snap.

  Tye hung from one hand, stood on one foot, and turned to see N’Dour already doing the same, dangling down toward a hand that waved in the air, bobbed on the swells. N’Dour caught that hand, grabbed hold of the upraised wrist, and the hand held him. The captain, this calm and aging gentleman from halfway around the world, wiry but small, hoisted Rosalie out of the water.

  N’Dour swung her toward Tye, who caught her and pressed her to the metal. She clasped the trestlework, babbling in terror, thanking Tye and God and N’Dour, maybe not in that order. Tye snapped at her to climb, to get out of the way, and he saw the pain in her eyes at this dismissal and couldn’t give a shit about that bit of hurt.

  “Go!” he roared, mad with fear, and she climbed.

  There was Kat. Right there in the water. Five feet from N’Dour and six feet below. How had she gotten there so quickly? Swimming hard against the current, against the waves? Maybe they’d been with her instead of against her; maybe they’d delivered her right back to the tower.

  Shapes loomed in the corners of his eyes. He ignored them. If he turned now and saw a fin, saw a Great White the size of the one that had gone for N’Dour—had it timed its attack so that it rode that huge swell up, so that it could get the height? Could it do that?

  You’re the goddamned scientist, he thought.

  Below, Kat swam toward the tower, whipping her head right and left in search of the death she knew was hunting her now.

&nb
sp; “Don’t look, Kat! Don’t you look!” Tye cried.

  He climbed down another set of latticed bars, plunged his boots into the water, planted his feet onto the lowest crossbeam. A swell rose till he was waist deep, and he and N’Dour both reached for Kat. Her eyes were wide. Tye stared into them and knew there’d been a thousand things unsaid between them, and he understood how badly he’d handled their relationship, both personally and professionally. In his mind’s eye, he saw what it could’ve been.

  “Come on, Kat!” Captain N’Dour snapped. “Reach!”

  She kicked her legs, swam with one arm, lunged out for Tye and N’Dour with the other. But then the swell subsided and a trough followed it and she dropped eight feet in half a second. Tye spotted the fin behind her then. Kat hadn’t seen it, but she didn’t have to. Panic engraved itself upon her face and she tried reaching for them again.

  “Climb!” Tye said even as he started to move lower. “Just—”

  He didn’t see the shark coming. It burst from the water on his left side, bleeding from its dead black eyes. Tye slammed himself against the tower and he felt the shark scrape against his back, crush him against the trestle, crack a rib or two. He heard screaming and turned to watch the shark slam back into the water, a huge splash rising around it.

  Kat screamed his name, but Tye wasn’t listening. He could only stare at Captain N’Dour. The man still hung from the tower with his left hand, but his right arm—the one with which he’d been reaching for Kat—was gone from above the elbow. Somehow he’d hung on, the shark’s jaws shearing off the arm with razor-sharp suddenness. N’Dour stared at the ragged stump of his arm and watched blood spray from the torn blood vessels, pouring down into the water. In shock, stunned into numb confusion, Tye could only think about the fact that sharks could smell a single drop of blood in the water from a quarter mile away. There were dozens of them closer to the tower than that … and so much more than a single drop of blood.

  N’Dour’s grip on the rusty bar slipped and he tumbled into the water, vanishing under the churning waves in the very same place where the shark that had taken his arm had gone under.

  Tye heard his name being screamed from above and from below.

  He blinked. Focused on Kat. She’d reached the corner of the tower and grabbed hold. The water rose and floated her enough that she managed a better grip. He climbed up a few feet and began to crab-walk sideways across the narrow tower. He thought of the fact that she’d known of his betrayal and said nothing. That when the truth had come out, mere minutes ago, he hadn’t even said he was sorry.

  The torn and bloody fingers of Kat’s left hand slipped on the bar. She slammed against the metal as the water level dropped beneath them. He saw her gaze shift and glanced back, saw a shark snatching the gory prize of N’Dour’s body and then dragging it down.

  A moment’s distraction. The water rose again.

  Kat shouted Tye’s name. He reached for her, but she lost her grip and fell back into the water. His fingers missed hers by inches, and only then, as her eyes locked on his one last time, did he see the shark dragging her down, already whipping her body from side to side as it submerged, a fresh blossom of blood unfurling beneath the sea.

  Up on the platform, the others were screaming for him to climb.

  Slowly, his own blood dripping into the water from his wounded leg, all his strength gone, Tye reached up for the next bar. And the next.

  CHAPTER 36

  Lorena held her phone up, camera on, and zoomed. While she and Kyle had been gathering up their gear, she hadn’t been able to keep track of Jim and Dorian on the water. Only when she and Kyle had retreated up the hill a bit and found a clearing in the trees, well back from where the storm surge would reach, had she had seen the fishing boat in the distance. Her heart had leapt and she’d turned to Kyle, let him look through her camera phone’s zoom to see the boat. She had told him everything would be all right now. That the people on Bald Cap would be saved and that they could all get out of this awful storm and go home and get dry. She’d promised Kyle that she would bake brownie cookies from scratch, just the way he liked them. Lorena wasn’t in any mood to bake, but she would have promised anything just to be able to be somewhere warm and dry.

  Her promises had been empty.

  “What is it?” Kyle asked when he heard her gasp, saw her horrified cringe. “Did someone fall? I thought I saw someone, a minute ago. I—”

  He reached for the phone and she slapped his hand away, turned her back to him. Shaking, she lifted the phone again and took a couple of steps to give herself distance from Kyle. Seventeen might be old enough these days for all sorts of things her generation thought of as the province of adulthood, but surely not for this horror.

  Lorena stared at the zoomed camera image. Several sharks were in a frenzy at the base of the watchtower, the water churning around them. Bald Cap had been swallowed by the sea and the storm. A man climbed the tower, slipped, and nearly fell, then seemed to be crawling up the metal scaffolding, practically dragging himself up the side.

  “Are they dead?” Kyle asked, his voice flat but clear, loud enough to be heard over the storm. “I see some heads up on top of the tower there, but the others … whoever fell … they’re dead, right?”

  “There’s one guy climbing back up,” she said, knowing there was no point in lying to Kyle. He’d be able to see well enough if he moved around a bit, just not in the same detail that the camera phone’s zoom provided. “He’s injured, I think, but he’s okay.”

  “What about Dorian and my dad?”

  Lorena tore her gaze away from the watchtower. Kyle might be seventeen, but in that moment she could see the little boy he must have been once upon a time. He might have been capable of great things at this age, but here with her on the island, unable to do anything but wait, he seemed so very young.

  “They’ll be all right,” she said. “They went off in the direction that fishing boat is coming from. Your father will signal them somehow. I’m sure he and Dorian are already onboard.”

  “You think?”

  Lorena swung the camera around and zoomed in on the fishing boat again, saw it plying the water straight for the tower. “Absolutely,” she said. But then she frowned and narrowed her eyes, took a step down the hill, and raised the camera, tried to get as focused a picture as possible. Out there to the southeast, amidst the gray skies and indigo swells, through the trees around the hill, hadn’t she just caught a glimpse of yellow bobbing on the water? Urgent yellow. Kayak yellow.

  She stared at the image on the camera. Kyle called her name.

  There, she thought. Another flicker of yellow, visible for a moment and then hidden again by the rough seas. She strained her eyes to see.

  The camera winked off. Lorena swore softly—something she almost never did—and started tapping the screen, thumbing the main control button. She unleashed a stream of profanity in her parents’ native Italian, the language of her youth, but the phone didn’t respond to cursing.

  “It’s dead,” Kyle said quietly.

  Lorena wanted to hurl the phone down the hill. Tensed to throw it. But then she took a breath and just gripped it in her fist, unable to stop thinking about the people who’d fallen off the tower and the man and woman she’d watched die through her camera phone’s zoom.

  Kyle told her it would be all right. It seemed they were taking turns at the reassurance game. She put an arm around him, still clutching the phone with her free hand, and stared out at the fishing boat as it made its way toward the watchtower, looking past the boat, searching the water for a splotch of yellow. Urgent yellow.

  Whatever had happened, at least it was over now. The men on the fishing boat would help them. She forced herself to stop looking for that flash of urgent yellow on the water and told herself that all she wanted was to go home. That was part of it, certainly, but it wasn’t the whole truth. She did want to go home, to leave this awful place and never return … but she didn’t want to go hom
e alone.

  CHAPTER 37

  Naomi had a handful of Rosalie’s coat, helping her up onto the platform, when she spotted the fishing boat churning toward them through the storm. She’d felt so isolated, so impossibly alone out here, that as she shifted aside to make room for Rosalie she watched the boat rise and fall on the sea and half-thought it was a daydream.

  “Boat,” she said, strangely calm. In shock.

  Kat and N’Dour were dead. A shark had struck the tower so hard that at least one rusted crossbeam had snapped and the tower seemed canted slightly northward now. Naomi’s skin had become so gray and sodden with constant rain that she could barely feel anything, and that numbness lent an impossible nightmarish quality to the world around her. The air shimmered, the rain fell, and it all felt unreal. A dream. Or the fevered imaginings of one who had already died.

  But then she shifted again, making sure Rosalie and Wolchko had room on the platform, and her prosthetic leg made a low hum, something to which she’d become so accustomed that she barely heard it anymore. But she heard it now, and it was real and tangible, connected to the visceral memory of the hard tug on her leg when the shark had bitten into her. Her shark, a summer ago. Somehow the missing leg and its unreal replacement were the things that reminded her that all of this must be real. In shock, numb, drowning in grief and fear, locked in nightmare … she woke up.

  “A boat,” Naomi said.

  Wolchko had been comforting Rosalie, who’d been shivering and crying and couldn’t stop talking about Kat being dead and N’Dour being dead and Tye still being down there on the side of the tower. Somewhere in the back of her mind Naomi realized it must have been rude of her to ignore Rosalie so completely, to blank out the other woman’s terror and shock, but they all had their own terror and shock, didn’t they? Rosalie’s terror and shock might be fresher, but only a little. Naomi had been looking down from the platform and seen N’Dour’s arm torn off, seen the captain fall in, seen Kat dragged under and the bloody frothing water as the sharks savaged them, there at the base of the tower. There in the place where they’d all been safe just a couple of hours before. Though they hadn’t all been safe, had they? Bergting had already been dead by then. So to hell with Rosalie’s terror and shock. Naomi had her own.